This Blog is for people who want to shape the future, not watch it happen.

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Will we live forever?

A thing many people don't believe me is when I say I'm serious about living forever. I understand their reaction, because they are usually not used to thinking into the future for long time-scales, or when they do, they fail to grasp the concept of exponential growth.

It is perfectly reasonably for every healthy man and women born after 1970 to expect to live forever. Let me explain you why:

First thing, the methods of prolonging life availible today are pretty good. They are expensive yet, but are subjected to exponential price/value growth, so expect them to be cheap before you know it. A good example for this is the story of Ray Kurzweil, who in the last 20 years aged only 2 years biologically due to extensive supplementation with food additives and substances the body loses with aging.

Second, Medicinal Bio-Engineering (MBE) is on a triumphal march for expanding your life vastly. Although one might not see it in public often it is one of the fastest growing sciences at the moment, and we will experience it's peak at around the mid 2020's. With MBE we can repair our DNA, switch off 'bad' genes and rejuvenate cells and organs indefinitely. Already we have grown heart cells from ordinary skin cells, a feat that was science-fiction only 10 years ago.

Third, Nanotechnology will truely revolutionize (read: radically accelerate) the way we think, our means of communication and damage-repair. With real Nanomedicine, which I expect to become viable around 2035, we can repair, change and transform our body in the blink of an eye, and 'natural' death will at last be part of the past.

Finally, when it is possible to 'upload' your human self totally into another substrate, like a nano-hyper-computer, we will at last have defeated death for good. I don't expect this to happen before 2060-80, but I am confident that I will reach this time with a formidable, healthy and young human body.

If you would like more info on one of the topics above, please comment and I'll see if I can help out.